They're made out of meat (1991)

Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...

The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg

Previously...

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 comments)

They're made out of meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 2020 (292 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1 comment)

They're Made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 - July 2014 (1 comment)

"They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 - Feb 2012 (62 comments)

They're made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)

Discarding evidence usually looks differently than "we discuss that we don't like". Is usually not looking at all, never starting a discussion, or even lacking intellectual framework to comprehend something.

See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at".

For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris Ocean, a mind (or non-mind?) we cannot relate to anything else. Or WAU from SOMA.

This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too..

The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sense. Maybe different RNA building blocks and genetic chemistry, but probably work out similar to meat and organic stuff.

Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."

Earlier I found it awe-inspiring. Nowadays I find it funny because we have yet to even remotely approach the complexity of meat.

"We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

Somebody recently recounted that they had been a convention of people who been 'abducted' by aliens. They commented that "Aliens certainly have a type".

This American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803

I love this short story, it's one whose memory visits me unbidden from time to time. I blogged about it over 20 years ago[1], and it was already around 15 years old at that time. OMNI magazine was great.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-o...

Related: Carl Sagan's Cosmos resampled to make a "Meat Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA

Somehow this story isn't as fun today as it was when first printed ...

The concept of "meat" presupposes the existence of carnivores, so it's hard to see how the realization in the story could ever have been surprising.

I think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"?

I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.

By all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)

Is including an iFrame to Terry Bison's website reprinting?

> It was incredible man. Mold on a rock that got to think. Ha, it was amazing while it lasted

I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.

So, Link, it's all very straightforward and scientific if you just think about it carefully for a moment : we're made out of pixels.

Great short film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg

I do wonder sometimes if someone out there is waiting for something actually intelligent to emerge down here.

see also Stanisław Lem

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I like this story, but I never liked the wording "made out of meat", as if the word exists in a world without animals. I could have accepted "proteins", but that's not a catchy title.

As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.

We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture.

To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.

Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness.

I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?